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Linksys Reviving The WRT54G Router In 802.11AC Form

01-06-2014, 03:52 PM

Phoronix: Linksys Reviving The WRT54G Router In 802.11AC Form

Many Phoronix readers likely recall the glory years of the open-source-friendly Linksys WRT54G router that for some is still a great device and there's still the thriving OpenWRT community. Good news out of CES today is that Linksys is letting the WRT54G live-on in the form of the 802.11ac-based WRT1900AC...

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This should be about the WRT54GL? The WRT54GL is the router with Linux based firmware that can be easily used with DD/Open WRT (i use one right now with DD-WRT). Some of the G/GS variants arent that OSS friendly AFAIK.

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"the open-source-friendly Linksys WRT54G"? You must be joking. As mentioned above the WRT54GL was the one that made it at least a bit opensource-friendly. The required Broadcom chip driver was still closed source and using it required running a 2.4x kernel. There were reverse enigeneering efforts like brcm47xx but in the time a ran OpenWRT on the WRT54GL 2.6 based brcm47xx has never been stable enough to be usable. It was a great device per specs, but the lack of opensource-friendlyness was actually the main reason why I replaced mines with some Buffalo WZRsomething later.

On some other news page the wording in regards to OpenWRT-compatibility was "they are going to port OpenWRT to it" which sounds rather awkward, given OpenWRT uses a Linux kernel with a minimum possible amount of patches. So, does Linux now run on hat new thing out of the box, or will OpenWRT devs be required to maintain a package for some binary driver blob sh*t yet again and Linksys will just work with them to get things (resp: the mess) started?

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Many Phoronix readers likely recall the glory years of the open-source-friendly Linksys WRT54G

Recall the glory years? *looks to the left* Yeah, my WRT54GL is running as fine as ever, thank you very much. That said, for the longest time I didn't know projects like DD-WRT existed. Then I found out they do, and now I'm running DD-WRT on it (and enjoying features like LAN computer names ? much easier to type in "ssh [email protected]" than "ssh [email protected]" and hope the IP hasn't changed since last time). And now that I do, I won't buy any routers without DD-WRT support.

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now I'm running DD-WRT on it (and enjoying features like LAN computer names – much easier to type in "ssh [email protected]" than "ssh [email protected]" and hope the IP hasn't changed since last time).